Research question: How can a (new) literacies perspective reframe or clarify the emerging scholarly conversation about digital media instruction for students engaged in professional ministerial training?
To keep myself organized as I begin to dip my toes into these waters, I'm starting a glossary of terms. I'll edit and clarify as my thinking changes and improves. For now, this is all coming from Vasudevan, L. (2010). Education remix: New media, literacies, and the emerging digital geographies. Digital Culture & Education, 2:1, 62-82.
literacies: See literacy practices. More coming, I'm sure, but even this equivalency is really important. I think this is significantly related to what James Gee in 1999 called the "social turn" that took place in literacy studies in the '80s. Point being (again, if I'm following): all of us engage in literacy practices and they are inherently socio-cultural.
New Literacy Studies: The body of literature that emerged from the social turn. Among the happenings are Brian Street's 1995 observation that literacies are multiple and that schools typically choose to privilege some over others. But multiple literacies are not to be confused with
multiliteracies: These "signal[] the multiple resources and communicative forms that inform the design of texts." Yes, quotation marks because I don't really get it yet. But I get that some of these resources and forms are digital. Thus...
new literacy studies: Note lack of capital letters. This is a generic label that has been applied to the work of folks studying how technology, as a set of such resources, changes that process of designing and enacting texts.
Digital literacies: See new literacy studies, I think, but sounds like we can say it in a more concrete and specialized way: the study of literacy practices using digital tools and/or within digital spaces. You'll notice what this isn't, which is of course how everyone, including me, tends to defines it ...
Digital literacy: The instrumentalist (mis)use of precise terminology that simultaneously reduces and expands the use of "digital literacies" above to basically mean "have a baseline competency using technology." This is roughly equivalent to the way people use terms like "technology literacy" (I heard this a lot in engineering school, usually in the context of lament about how people don't really understand science [yeah...]) and "financial literacy" (balancing a checkbook, being able to explain the cause of the Financial Crisis, etc.—basically what you achieve when you read How to Speak Money, which you should do because, of course, whether or not "financial literacy" is a stupid term, it is terrifyingly important and rare).
For what it's worth, I think I'm a little closer to describing the ways in which the work I've been doing has been supporting the development of digital literacies among faith leaders (as Lalitha and her colleagues conceive them). In fact, that's been the vast majority of it. That people (including me) sometimes narrow that to "digital literacy" in the instrumentalist sense is due to the fact that
How do we construct (religious) texts that convey (religious) meaning in digital geographies (error: undefined). This question matters a lot both to how we teach church leaders to use technology and, I believe, how we teach them everything else.
P. S. Digital geographies: Basically, the hybrid spaces we all move in and out of all the time. See, for example, Keith Anderson's Digital Cathedral.
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